Characteristics of the Public Administration Moving away from the liberal free-trade origins of the Italian state, the public administration has passed from making a small number of significant interventions (fiscal, educational, large-scale public works, defence, public order and international relations) by authoritative means (administrative acts modifying without the consent of the third party their legal position by implementing an often discretionary act of parliament). It now makes a far wider range of interventions and uses new methods of action. Nevertheless, the public administration corresponds not only to the rules imposed by the legislators but to four rigorous constitutional regulations, one being substantial and the other three organizational. Article 97 of the constitution states that the public powers must conform in their actions to strict principles of good management and impartiality of administration. By `good management' is intended a complex of legal and non-legal rules, whose purpose is to ensure a real and constant balance between the public function and the citizens' fundamental rights while respecting the formal rules and those of economy, efficiency and correlation with the objectives. Ìmpartiality' is seen not only as a simple avoidance of inequality but rather as a system to ensure that administrative decisions take positive account of all the interests involved. The Constitution's Article 5, under the organizational heading, contains the rules for decentralization and autonomy. The first rule imposes on the State, in the exercise of its duties, the obligation to open up the administration to the citizens by entrusting to the organs dependent on the central powers the direction of those interests that are not considered of national importance. The second rule instead assures administrative pluralism, since it provides for politically independent administrative power, which are also unlike those of the State, to operate alongside the State's central and decentralized administration. A third important element is contained in the distribution of competence among the necessary administrative entities: State, Region, Province and Commune. Article 118 of the Constitution, referring to the contents listed in Article 117 of the same Constitution, enumerates the competences of the Regions under ordinary statute and other constitutional level norms, while fixing the Regions' administrative responsibilities under special statute. This signifies that the minimum responsibilities of the Regions are rigorously fixed and the remainder are reserved to the State who can allocate them, by general laws, to the Provinces and Communes (Article 128 of the Constitution), as well as delegating particular functions to the Regions (Article 118 of the Constitution). Finally, the Constitution describes a further principle of institutional engineering and that is political control by the citizens of administrative power. With the provision of the necessary administrative entities, whether State, Regions, Provinces or Communes, the constitutional charter displays a tendency to concentrate administrative powers on entities whose organs are democratically elected and who are, furthermore, subject to the critical scrutiny of the popular vote. Only residually does the Constitution permit explicitly for the Regions and implicitly for the State and local entities the possibility of creating dependent entities and functional administrators for the public interests entrusted to them. The rule, therefore, is that of direct political control and the exception that of indirect control through the exercise of the vote on the subjects from which the functional entities depend. As will be clear, these basic principles have to remain sufficiently flexible to reflect the rapid changes produced in the public administration by social and political events, which impose continuous adaptation on the administrative structure.